ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Walking the Line

Consultancy is a hard gig. Most companies walk a very fine line between body shopping and offering professional services.

An organisation favouring body shopping usually hires consultants for a particular contract; with no long term view on how that employee could be best utilised to grow the company. The organisation often charges clients per hour, and usually has little to no control over the running of the projects that their staff members are working on.

The employee is often placed out a client site with little or no exposure to the goings on in the larger organisation. Eventually boredom sets in or the contract runs out, and the employees move on to the next body shopping firm in a hope that the grass will be greener on the other side.

Organisations offering professional services tend to be more interested in providing highly skilled resources to perform a particular task. The entire project or service is usually managed by the consulting firm, and employees are often seen as important resources that can benefit the company in the future.

In reality most consulting firms tend to flip-flop between the two. Some companies favour one style over the other, but most of the time you can find elements of both in an organisation.

If you think being a consultant is a lonely an unfulfilling job then congratulations, you probably work in a body shop. The lack of employee focus encouraged by this approach leaves many guys in the business asking why they bother getting out of bed in the morning. The good news is that it's not body shopping per se that is causing this dissatisfaction; it's the approach to staff development and corporate culture that normally goes along with body shopping.

Succession planning is often spoken about in terms of how to better position a company to replace key resources in the event of unexpected staff turnover. What many people don't realise is that the core principles of succession planning (mentoring, training and job rotation) can often help fight the feeling of stagnation that goes along with working in a consulting firm, in turn helping to increase retention rates.

Any developer worth his salt is looking to improve his skills, and training and mentoring are two great ways of helping a developer do just that.

A formal training program with links to industry based certification always helps, but it's also expensive to implement. Maintaining a library of recommended reading and encouraging staff to read them can often be enough to show that the developer's personal growth and career development is important to the company. Staff training has the nice side effect of giving the consulting firm access to an increased skill set that can be on sold to clients.

Another way to create a positive learning environment for is to get developers talking amongst themselves. This could be through one on one mentoring, a group based discussion forum or some other means. It is often good to encourage this amongst groups who would not normally mix, e.g. two different project teams working with different clients. This is even more important for the employees out on client sites, as it lets them know that they are part of a larger company and gives them something to belong to. It gives the impression that they are part of a larger practice that has goals outside of their current engagement.

It's my belief that job rotation is the most important practice that a consulting firm can take from the book of succession planning. Sure, it mitigates risk by ensuring that more than one person knows how to do a particular job, but it also helps to fight boredom, and, above all else, it increases the exposure a developer gets to other areas of the company. This exposure is vital to negating the "cubical drone" effect usually brought on by long term client engagements.

Keeping everyone fully billable reduces organisational agility, and even encourages body shopping. If there is no one available to take on new work then the temptation exists to hire in resources just to cover specific projects. Maintaining a strong, healthy bench reducing expected chargeability rates can help enable all the benefits of succession planning. Staff working back at base camp could be busy training, mentoring or helping with pre-sales work, all while being available to take on new work should it arise. This can help to maintain a happy workforce who actually want to come into work every day, which can only be good for the company.